Hospital volunteer keeps on truckin': 'It keeps me out of bars, and the nursing home'

Dick Blume/The Post StandardArlene Stone, 87, has been a volunteer at Crouse Hospital for 12 years. She works two shifts a week.Kate Day said I should talk to Arlene Stone. She’s managing chaplain at Crouse Hospital.
“Arlene’s tiny and she has an indomitable air about her,” the minister explained.
She’s right.
Arlene will be 87 years old in July, “if I make it,” she says, with a sly smile, knowing she will. She works two shifts a week as a volunteer at Crouse, which she calls “the best hospital ever.” She’s been on this job 12 years.
She comes to work in sneakers.
“We’re really kept busy here,” Arlene says. I caught her during a brief rest-up. She does a lot of fast-walking: wheeling patients in and out of the building, taking specimens to the laboratory (very important, according to Arlene), taking charts to Records. Arlene quotes “Satchel” Paige: You have to keep running; someone may be gaining on you.
Baseball’s played a big part in her life. Arlene calls herself a “die-hard Yankees fan” who wears a team button on her work blouse. Lou Gehrig was a hero for her. Growing up (on the North Side and in Eastwood), she played a little ball herself, as a semi-pro center fielder in a league with no name but lots of spunk.
“I played ball all the time with boys,” Arlene’s saying, her eyes flashing. “Beat ‘em sometimes, too. I don’t like girly things.”
Sometimes it seemed she was out every night, playing on that little field next to Kilian’s on Burnet Avenue. Their game was fast-pitch softball – no sissy stuff for Arlene. They’d get a team together and go out and find somebody to play. Sometimes they’d travel to Rochester and Montreal, looking for an opponent to beat up on.
Arlene played for a team sponsored by The Prosperity Co. (the laundry machine people) and they won a state championship. The team disbanded after World War II.
She even worked for Prosperity for a while during the war. After that, she married Arthur Stone, who’d spent 25 years in the Air Force. Arthur also did a turn with the “Boys From Syracuse” as a jet mechanic. Her husband was killed in a car crash in 1997, the day after Christmas. They were married 54 years and had four children and a little house in Eastwood that Arlene still owns.
One son is James Stone, a city police officer 34 years.
The Stones have nine grandchildren and three greats. One of those great grandkids is Nicholas Wentworth, who recently joined a Little League team in North Syracuse. He told Grandma he was fed up with tee-ball. “I want them to throw the ball to me,” he told Arlene, who treasures having a baseball player in the family.
After working, she traveled with her husband and played golf. She still shoots a few rounds at Arrowhead Golf Course, for the sociability of it.
She’s survived intestinal surgery and a heart attack, in 2006, which kept her away from volunteering at the hospital for six weeks. Arlene says her cardiologist warned her to slow down after that attack. She insists she’s better off working.
“It keeps me out of bars, and the nursing home,” she explains.
“Any time you give to someone else,” according to Arlene, “you’re doing something for yourself. I get a lot more than I give here.”
Pennie Stagnitta is in charge of the Volunteer Services office at Crouse Hospital. She says she has about 200 active adult volunteers, who do jobs ranging from working in the surgery suite to the gift shop. That includes some retired physicians and nurses. Pennie includes herself in that rank.
“They are the soul of our hospital,” she says.
Dick Case writes Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 470-2254, or by e-mail, dcase@syracuse.com.